Preston would lose $749,000 under a proposal by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to eliminate taxes on any vehicle assessed at $20,000 or less, First Selectman Robert Congdon said Thursday.

“The winner would be a renter who only owned a car; the loser is everybody else,” Congdon said during a Board of Selectmen meeting at Town Hall in which that and other Malloy proposals were discussed.

If passed by the General Assembly the tax reduction, part of a $43.8 million budget plan, would take effect July 1, 2014.

State Rep. Timothy Bowles, D-Preston, who is also a member of the Preston Board of Selectmen, characterized the car tax idea as a controversial surprise.

“It was a bombshell,” he said of the idea, which the governor put forward Tuesday.

The budget plan’s overall spending increase is not one Preston citizens would accept from town government, Congdon said.

“As a Board of Selectmen, if we came in with a 5.1 percent spending increase, people would be looking for some tall oak trees to hang us from,” he said.

Malloy’s 2014-15 proposal would cause Preston to lose $271,447 in each year from the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan Grant program, but that exact amount would be made up from the Local Capital Improvement Program, officials said. Preston would get $78,601 less in each of the years for public school transportation compared with 2013. Town Aid Road would increase by $99,890 in each year. Education Cost Sharing grant funding would rise by $10,879 in 2014 and 2015, according to a chart distributed by Congdon at the selectmen’s meeting.

Selectman Michael Sinko asked Bowles for the reason behind the car tax idea. Bowles declined to speculate, saying he’s collecting information from municipal leaders in his district, which includes parts of Ledyard and Montville, to be used in discussions in the state capital.